Skip to main content
glaustin
glaustin
Inspiring
July 19, 2019
Answered

Best Scan Configuration for Acrobat Pro DC

  • July 19, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 3999 views

Hi Guys

Can I pick your brains, please?

I run Win10, Nvidia Quadro P6000 and have an Epson 2750 printer. I scan a lot of documents through that printer using the Acrobat Pro DC (v:2019 012.20035) interface.

At the moment I have set my scan preferences to scan both sides, auto detect colour, 300dpi and paper size at A4.. My scans always come out with a slight fuzzy fringe around the text and a haziness in any colour pictures. They are normally quite large file sizes as well, which is a pain if I have to transmit several documents onwards. I get the same issues if I output a Word/ Excel Document to Acrobat. I did try using the printers own scan interface, but that was worse...

Is there a way to configure for:

1. sharper quality outputs? or

2. sharper outputs without large files?

Any thoughts welcome.

Regards,

Graham

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Dov Isaacs

Some thoughts:

(1)     In terms of text, 300dpi for text will definitely yield fuzzy-wuzzy text for scanning. 600dpi is probably the minimum resolution you should be using if text quality is important to you.

(2)     Sharpness can also be affected by the format used by the Epson scanner interface software even if your scanning is initiated through Acrobat or Photoshop (using Epson's interface). The File Save Settings of the Epson driver allow specification of image format. JPEG will fuzz the edges of text much more than TIFF for example.

(3)     Automatic settings often yield mediocrity. You need to experiment with the settings for color, resolution, and file format (i.e., compression).

(4)     High quality raster content by definition yields large files, especially as you increase the resolution and avoid lossy JPEG compression.

You mention that you “get the same issues” if you “output a Word / Excel document to Acrobat.” Are those issues with native text in Word or Excel or images placed into Word or Excel? Text in Word or Excel should yield text in PDF assuming you are using Acrobat to generate the PDF (as opposed to Microsoft's own Save as PDF) and that should not be “fuzzy” in any way. Please explain what you are doing (or not).

          - Dov

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov IsaacsCorrect answer
Legend
July 19, 2019

Some thoughts:

(1)     In terms of text, 300dpi for text will definitely yield fuzzy-wuzzy text for scanning. 600dpi is probably the minimum resolution you should be using if text quality is important to you.

(2)     Sharpness can also be affected by the format used by the Epson scanner interface software even if your scanning is initiated through Acrobat or Photoshop (using Epson's interface). The File Save Settings of the Epson driver allow specification of image format. JPEG will fuzz the edges of text much more than TIFF for example.

(3)     Automatic settings often yield mediocrity. You need to experiment with the settings for color, resolution, and file format (i.e., compression).

(4)     High quality raster content by definition yields large files, especially as you increase the resolution and avoid lossy JPEG compression.

You mention that you “get the same issues” if you “output a Word / Excel document to Acrobat.” Are those issues with native text in Word or Excel or images placed into Word or Excel? Text in Word or Excel should yield text in PDF assuming you are using Acrobat to generate the PDF (as opposed to Microsoft's own Save as PDF) and that should not be “fuzzy” in any way. Please explain what you are doing (or not).

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
glaustin
glaustinAuthor
Inspiring
July 20, 2019

Hi Dov

Many thanks for your thoughts and I will experiment. I have used Acrobat Pro DC with different scanners and had roughly the same results.

Regarding Word/ Excel, I am outputting using the acrobat button in the Word or Excel toolbar. Yes, the resolution is better than a scan, but if I have Excel rows in a light yellow and a text in red for example, the row definition and lettering looks a bit hazy.

G

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
July 22, 2019

Graham,

I think I know the source of your problems with image quality coming out of Microsoft Office documents when either creating PDF or even printing.

When you place content into Microsoft Office documents, they are often downsampled by default. To avoid this (or at least extreme downsampling), you need to set the options as follows for Word:

There are similar settings for Excel and PowerPoint. This can make a tremendous difference in terms of quality of output!

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices